1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to information display, and more particularly, to character string display on a user interface in a computing environment.
2. Background Information
When labels or messages on a user interface such as a web browser are too long to fit into a specific width area, they need to be truncated. Conventional approaches involve truncating the label and placing ellipsis at the end ( . . . ), with a hover tooltip showing the full text, e.g. “My Labe . . . ” (for “My Label Is Shown”).
In the case of editing a Web Ontology Language (OWL) file, if a classification in the system does not have a label, then the OWL Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) is used as the label. These are typically of the form, e.g., http://www.ibm.com/classification/business/data/ and usually all start with the same URI in a given classification system. Therefore, truncating these at the end is not desirable. If several labels are shown, they will all be “http://www.ibm.com/class . . . ” and as such, the user must hover them to discover meaningful information.
Furthermore, the OWL URI is not guaranteed to provide meaningful information since an entity is free to dictate the structure of its URIs (e.g., http://www.business.com/hr/classification, http://www.business.com/services/classification, http://www.business.com/development/classification) whereby a solution which uses a fixed position to truncate from is problematic.